Dave Orchard writes:
One way that I think Web and Web services are different from distributed objects is that they make the data format on the wire (html, xml,..), the object references (URIs), the protocol messages (HTTP) and the description human readable. Well, maybe wsdl isn’t the most human readable. Distributed objects on the other hand make the description (idl) human readable and the wire format, object references, and protocol messages binary. Now that might be a sufficient reason. There are plenty of others, such as the late binding of the information content to the user, the ability to have high performance due to ease of inspecting the HTTP message method and URI to determine equivalence, etc.
But I think there’s another big and untouted reason: Extensibility. If you take a look at comparing the Web to distributed objects, the invocation mechanics are quite different.